Way Of The Clans

by Robert Thurston

  When they were a sufficient distance away from the others, Joanna said, "Ter Roshak does not want you to participate in the exercise. When I have deployed the others, you will come with me as if to be placed on the other side of the course as a sniper. Then we will get you clear of the main action. When it is over, you will return. That way, you will—"

  "Stop it, Joanna! You lied to them. You told them both sides were equipped with weapons set at stun. You know as well as I do that only the freeborns have the weak weapons. They can be killed."

  "That is the risk, yes. Only a few do wind up dead, however."

  "But that is murder."

  Joanna looked away from him, her face showing disgust. "Ter Roshak must be mad to back you. I have no idea what it is about, but I wish I was not under orders to see that you get through."

  "I thought you said you were not to interfere."

  "Another of my lies. Forget that. Just do what you are ordered. You will never become a warrior with your rebellious attitudes and softheaded emotionalism. You must strip away both." She took a deep breath. "It is not murder. It is a part of training. Like other phases of training, the risk of death is always present. You saw others in your own sibko die, and the risk is the same for freeborns. If they die, so be it. If they survive, it is because they have shown some mettle, despite being freeborns. Your orders are to accompany me and stay out of the action. Why should you even consider the fate of these foul freebirths? You killed five freeborns in your own Trial. Ponder that for a while. That is all. Return to your unit."

  Aidan wanted to say more, but he knew Joanna would not allow it. As he returned to the others, he considered telling them what to really expect, but that would mean revealing his cover and he could not do that. Nobody would gain from it. He would not get his second Trial and the unit would still have to risk their lives in the forest.

  "Looked from here like you two were having an argument," Tom said.

  "No," Aidan replied, "I was just proposing extra rations for tonight after the long march back."

  He hated every word of the lie. It seemed to tie him in a tight chain to the lies of Ter Roshak and Joanna. Looking around, he saw Horse watching him intently. Suddenly the magnitude of his lies struck Aidan. Horse knew who he was and was keeping quiet about it, while Aidan's lie was setting the other cadets up to possibly be killed. Was that what it meant to be a warrior? To make hard decisions coldly, to sacrifice friends when necessary, to order allies into battle with the odds against them? The lessons the sibko had learned from Dermot tended to support such views.

  Joanna would say that Aidan must turn his back on Horse and let the young freeborn shift for himself. Perhaps she was right. But it was hard for Aidan to be unfair with someone who had been so fair to him. Pretending he needed to make a weapons check, he walked away from the group. Only Horse seemed to notice.

  After Joanna had found strategic positions for the others, she led Aidan away, ostensibly to select his deployment.

  "This will be far enough away from the action," she said after they had walked about fifteen minutes. She indicated a small open area where he could sit with his back comfortably against a tree. "Stay here and relax. I have other duties in this Trial, and I hear the personnel carrier arriving."

  As she walked away, he, too, heard the arriving vehicle. Laying his head back against the bark of the tree and shutting his eyes, he remembered himself," Bret, and Marthe arriving for their Trial, the anticipation he had felt, the wild dash through the forest and (as Joanna had so astutely pointed out) his killing of so many freeborns, the exhilaration of being in the 'Mech, the thrill of the battle, even the despairing excitement of failing. For the first time in a long while, he recalled the sensation of sailing through the air in his ejection seat—the ground coming up to meet him, the landscape extending far in all directions.

  Opening his eyes, he noted how peaceful the forest seemed. Above him a branch bobbed lightly. At first, recalling his Trial, he thought it was a sniper. Somewhere in the foliage a small bird must be traveling along the branch. The bobbing stopped and another branch moved. He got a glimpse of some blue and white feathers between a pair of leaves.

  Suddenly he could not sit still either. It felt wrong to sit here while the others were in danger. In spite of Joanna's orders, he at least wanted to be nearer the action. Hiding out for his own safety was simply not in his nature. Even Joanna should have known that.

  Moving cautiously, he went back the way he had come with her. His survival training had instilled in him an instinct for noting geographical features and remembering particular trees. It did not take too long to find a location near where the members of his unit were hiding. Going to ground, he crawled back to the edge of the forest. In the clearing there, he could see the hovercraft, landed and quiet. Nearer were a group of training officers, and among them, the two trainees about to take their Trial, a male and a female. They looked as much alike as he and Marthe had. Both were tall, about the same height, and both held themselves with a kind of eager pride that reminded him, not only of himself and Marthe, but of several of his sibkin. For a moment, he saw his sibko as it had been when they had first arrived on Ironhold and played their ludicrous game of team tussle in front of the scornful officers. Perhaps the sibko of this pair of Trial candidates had been similarly foolish on their arrival before going through the long stages that had whittled their group down to this duo. The sibko experience might be identical for all. He would never know that. Most would not have cared to know, and he wondered why he did.

  He could see that the course officer was about to give the signal to start, so he edged back into the forest. Standing up, he tried to retrace the path to his comrades. It amused him to think of how furious Joanna would be to know he used that word for them even in his thoughts. But this time his tracking instincts failed him. He could not remember just where Joanna had positioned any of them. He would have to wait until the Trial started and watch for events to develop.

  Returning to the wood's edge, he looked out from behind a tree. He was further down the course now and had a different angle on the scene. The signal was about to be made. The two candidates were more eager than ever for the Trial to start.

  At the signal, both broke into a run and disappeared into the forest. Aidan worked his way toward where they had entered the forest. He spotted the male candidate and tracked him, a difficult task because the cadet moved so fast.

  Aidan had to stay far enough behind so that he did not become a target himself. In a particularly dense part of the woods, he lost sight of the cadet.

  Ahead of him was a slight rise. He ran to it, hoping for a better view. What he saw surprised him.

  Falconer Joanna was in the forest and moving stealthily away from him. She could not have seen him. Using trees as cover, he worked his way toward her. Because she was moving slowly, he was able to get quite close.

  They had reached an open area, one he recognized now as the place where Joanna had assigned Horse. What was she up to? Did the falconers observe their charges from positions inside the forest? He began to doubt that possibility when he saw her draw a laser pistol and hold it tight against her side.

  Looking beyond her, Aidan saw Horse leaping out of his hiding place onto the back of the male cadet, who apparently had been ripe for ambush. The two wrestled briefly and Horse came up with the candidate's weapon, a short-barreled rifle that could be worn in a holster. Horse immediately pointed it at the young man's face and looked as if he was going to blast the trueborn's head off.

  At the same time Joanna raised her pistol, and Aidan realized she intended to kill Horse. That was against all the rules of the Trial. An officer could not interfere with any part of it, not even to protect the primary candidates.

  Leaping from his hiding place, Aidan's hands brushed against Joanna's arm just before she fired, and her shot streamed high into the air. He looked into the clearing. Apparently Horse had not been aware of Joanna's ambush, so intent was h
e on his own. The cadet had made a futile grab to get his weapon back, but Horse had merely kicked him to the ground. He shifted his aim from the trueborn's head to his legs and shot him there. The cadet grabbed his right leg in pain. Hurling the rifle away, Horse quickly vanished into the forest. The true-born tried to stand up, but his leg collapsed beneath him. Aidan could appreciate the look of disappointment on the young man's face.

  "You rotten freebirth!" Joanna muttered. "You had no right to deflect my aim. What are you doing here anyway? I told you to stay—"

  "You have no right to rebuke me, Falconer. I may not have followed orders but what you were doing was worse. You would have killed him, is that right?"

  "Of course I would. He is only a freeborn. Why should I care about killing him? After all, he was going to kill a trueborn, a potential warrior."

  "Not any more." He indicated the trueborn's sad, weary crawl out of the clearing. "At any rate, I do not believe you. You were not protecting the candidate. That was just a convenient excuse. You were here to kill Horse."

  "Do not be ridiculous. Horse had the cadet's gun, a live weapon. I was just protecting—"

  "Save your excuses. I know what it is all about. I do not know how Ter Roshak discovered it but—"

  "Ter Roshak had nothing to do with it."

  "Another lie of yours. I told him I would abandon the warrior training if he interfered again. He has interfered again. Another convenient accident, with Horse the victim, and the Trial a fine place to create an accident."

  "You cannot abandon—"

  He held up his hand to stop her talking, for once giving his own order. "Take this message back to Ter Roshak. In a way he has won. I will go on. I realized in coming here today that I need to be a warrior too much to allow someone like him to drive me away from it with his manipulations. Tell him there is no need to interfere again. I will not fail this time."

  The two stared at each other for a long while. Aidan despised the hint of victory in Joanna's eyes.

  "Goodbye," he said suddenly and began walking away from her.

  "Where are you going?"

  "There is something I want to see."

  Along the way, he found Horse and the two ran to the other end of the forest. At the rim, they were joined by Spiro and Tom.

  "Nigel was killed," Tom said softly. "Blown up by a grenade. The woman had a grenade."

  Nobody said anything else.

  Aidan pointed forward. They could just see the female candidate running up a hill toward her 'Mech. She took long strides and Aidan marveled at the grace of them.

  They watched her scale the heights of her 'Mech and then get it operational. They watched her rapidly initiate its trip up the hill. They watched the 'Mech take strides that were not as lithe as its pilot's, but had a certain grace of their own. They watched the 'Mech reach the crest of the hill and begin to descend the other side. Gradually, the legs, then the torso, then the head vanished behind the hill.

  Aidan and the others stayed at the edge of the forest and listened to the sounds of battle. They could see some of the firing streak high through the air. Finally, they heard a 'Mech fall and were agreed in their hope it was not the female cadet's.

  Later, back at barracks, Aidan stayed awake while the others slept—fitfully, it seemed. He was sorrowful. Now Nigel had been added to the list of victims scattered over his trail on the way to becoming a warrior.

  39

  The freeborn unit reached the Trial without any further loss of personnel. The last weeks of training were an odd combination of anticipation and boredom for Aidan. Having been through it all previously, the repetitions irritated him, as they were useful only for honing his skills. Even then, he had to pretend a difficulty he did not feel. Still, with each task accomplished, he was that much closer to once more occupying the cockpit of a Trial BattleMech.

  During the fitting for his neurohelmet, he was disappointed that someone other than Alexander gave him the instructions. The new voice was not nearly as gentle and persuasive.

  The last days came and went, and then the unit was loaded onto a skimmer and taken to the Trial field. Examining the maps they were given, Aidan was glad to see that he would confront a different area, a different terrain. There would be no run through a dense woods, just a race across an open field to the 'Mech and a trip across a river into hilly country, where they could expect to find their opponents. There would be no freeborn ambushes, they were told by Falconer Joanna. Freeborns were not wasted in the Trials of other freeborns.

  Though Aidan was relieved that he would not have to face the duplication of the killing of freeborns from his first Trial, he deeply felt the insult, the knowledge that trueborn officers regarded freeborn cadets as so inferior that they were not allowed the complete Trial. From his previous life as a cadet, Aidan knew that freeborn candidates had a higher failure rate in the Trial. At that time, he, like the others, blamed it on the inferiority of the freeborn. Now, having seen the way freeborns were treated, he knew that the failure rate was as much lack of inadequate preparation and, as now, the selection of a more difficult site for their test. The system declared that freeborns were just as eligible to become warriors as trueborns, but the system saw to it that freeborns became warriors with only the greatest possible difficulty.

  Or perhaps the system was not stacked against freeborns as much as Aidan thought. Perhaps they were the victims of trueborn attitudes. Trueborns were always in charge; therefore, the desultory preparation, the shoddy conditions, were not the result of malicious intentions but merely of deep-seated antagonisms.

  At the Trial site, they drew lots. Spiro and Tom would go out in the first wave, while Horse and Jorge had to remain behind, waiting out the long time period before the first Trial ended and theirs began.

  As Tom and Spiro raced to their 'Mechs, Jorge and Horse watched from a vantage point next to the skimmer that had delivered them to the site.

  "Where'd Falconer Joanna disappear to?" Horse asked.

  "I suspect she might be taking out one of the opposition 'Mechs. She's a fine pilot, I've heard."

  "You don't have to use the contractions around me."

  "I've gotten used to them. If I get in a trueborn Star, I will have to remember to drop them."

  After a pause, Horse said: "I've looked for the proper moment to thank you. I think this is it."

  "What do you mean?"

  "I know what you did for me back at the other Trial site."

  "You did? How? It is not possible."

  "I am not blind. I saw the shot that went astray. After I ran out of the clearing, I doubled back and came upon you arguing with our honored falconer. I was tempted to take a potshot at her, but I figured the unit could not survive still another training officer. So, as I said, my thanks."

  Aidan reddened. "Well, after all, I owed you a favor. You kept my identity secret."

  Horse nodded. In the field the 'Mechs were moving. Soon they were out of sight.

  This time they only heard the sounds of battle—sites were designed so that the waiting Trial candidates could get no advantages by studying what their predecessors did. And they did not hear many sounds. The engagements were over quickly.

  Aidan and Horse endured the long wait until the Trial results were announced. Both Tom and Spiro had been defeated. Spiro had been hurt. He would lose a leg, someone said.

  "That certainly adds to my optimism," Horse said. "I wish they'd start us."

  "Horse?"

  "We might be able to prevail if we formed a team."

  "Isn't that against the rules? I mean, aren't we supposed to fight individually, in good Clan style?"

  "That is custom, but not a rule. What if we stay close together instead of competing? What do you say?"

  "I don't know. But I'm scared enough to try it."

  "Good."

  Just then, an officer walked up to tell them that it was almost time for the signal to begin.

  40

  The Summoner strutt
ed into the hills side by side, almost shoulder to shoulder. There was no commlink between the two 'Mechs, but Aidan and Horse had quickly worked out their strategy while awaiting the signal to start. Aidan thought it possible the cooperative plan had been tried before, but their opponents, all seasoned warriors, might not anticipate it from what they perceived as a pair of freeborns. If Joanna was in one of the 'Mechs—and he fully expected her to pilot the first one to be set against him—she would have the added surprise and shock of knowing it was a trueborn cooperating with a freeborn.

  A mist had settled near the ground, giving the place an eerie, dreamlike look. Aidan watched the feet of Horse's 'Mech lift out of the mist and then step back into it, and knew that, to Horse, Aidan's 'Mech was doing the same.

  All his weapon systems were ready. When making his systems check, there had been no failures, no indications of mechanical dysfunction or jamming. Unlike his last outing, he had not been able to make minor reconfigurations of his 'Mech, although the one he piloted had a short-range missile system instead of the usual LRM in its left torso. He also had an extended-range small laser slung under the PPC in his 'Mech's right arm. Aidan assumed that the same alterations had been made in Horse's Summoner. Apparently the ability to choose one's own configurations was another trueborn privilege denied to freeborns. Oh, well, he thought, that does not matter. In hilly terrain like this, we are better off traveling light. He felt he could maintain balance better without too much weapons encumbrance. Maintaining balance was a real effort in this terrain, not only for the hilliness but because the heavy mist forced them to maneuver via computer-generated geological diagrams.

  The first challenge came rather quickly. Coming over a hill and looming from the mist, three 'Mechs—a Hellbringer, a Warhawk, and an Executioner—appeared slowly. The Hellbringer continued to advance until it was more than 600 meters ahead of the other two 'Mechs of the trio, as if to show contempt for the freebirths, as if to say only one 'Mech was needed to take one on. When the Hellbringer gestured toward Aidan, he lifted both of his 'Mech's arms up and down to indicate acceptance of the engagement. A formality only, one of those odd bits of courtesy used in tests but rarely in battle, where there was no time for etiquette.